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Using Google Analytics to Measure and Improve Your Content Marketing

June 4, 2019 No Comments

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear about Google Analytics?

For most people it has probably something to do with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but did you know that next to that Google Analytics (GA) also holds tons of insights into how you can create better content for your business?

To save time and money for your company don’t you think it would be better if you could create better content, instead of more content?

Better content that could help you rank better for the search terms that you want to be found for? Instead of just trying to create as much content as possible hoping you eventually will rank?

There are, however, dozens of different ways to slice and dice all the information that is available in Google Analytics to come up with killer content ideas.

To help you get the most out of your valuable time and to help guide you to improve your content marketing, this post will help you set up your Google Analytics, teaches you the most common terminology you need to navigate through all the reports and help get the most out of your content marketing.

First, let’s figure out why you should be taking the time to learn and use Google Analytics for your Content Marketing.

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Why is Google Analytics important for content marketing?

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It. – Peter Drucker Click To Tweet

Management thinker Peter Drucker was right, for you to improve any parts of your business, you need to be able to measure it. And what easier way to measure using a tool that offers incredible reporting features at no cost, from a company that is already collecting vast amounts of data from your company and your customers.

By reading the numbers, Google Analytics can capture about your business and try to figure out the story they are trying to tell you is THE best way to not just make data-informed marketing decisions, but to also improve your marketing performance in general.

Let’s say for example you’ve got an idea for a piece of content. You assume that this is the kind of material your customers are waiting for after all content marketing is just solving the same problems that your product solves through media you create and promote, right?

So you do some research online, you start creating what you think is the absolute best piece of content around the subject you’ve ever seen, and you hit that publish button.

If you’re not having any forms of analytics, your story will end just there. Your piece of content is online, and you’re hoping for the best. Maybe you would see new leads coming in, but that’s it.

By using analytics (and Google Analytics is one of the best, easy and free tools available), you would not only know if that piece of content is hitting the marks, but you can also figure out the rest of the story.

What are all the individual pieces that led up to that conversion, to the people coming to your site?

It doesn’t only help you to establish your goals. It can help you to learn how to repeat the process in the most efficient ways, coming up with new content topics, maybe learning how you need to make adjustments to your content, so it does hit the mark etc.

And not only that, Google Analytics can help you answer questions like:

How effective are my Content Marketing efforts?
What are the pieces of content that are the least effective and turn visitors away?
Are my efforts improving over time?
Which types of content are most effective for converting visitors? Which types of content are most effective to build traffic?
What are some content topics that I’m missing out on?
What are some quick wins that I can implement?

You see, the better data you have the more informed decisions you can make about your content marketing strategy and how to move forward.

Implementing Google Analytics on your site

Now that you know the importance of measuring your Content Marketing efforts using Google Analytics let’s dive into the basics to help you get started.

Creating a Google Analytics account

First things first, before you can use Google Analytics you have to set up Google Analytics on your website of course.

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, you can quickly create one for free on the Google Analytics website!

To create a Google Analytics account:

Click here to go to Google Analytics. Note: If you have a Google account, and are not signed in, click Sign in. If you do not have a Google account, click Create an account.
Once you have signed in to your Google account, click Access Google Analytics.
Click Sign up.
Fill in your Account Name, Website Name, Website URL, and select an Industry Category and Reporting Time Zone.
Under Data Sharing Options, check the boxes next to the options that you want.
Click Get Tracking ID.
From the Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement that opens, click I Accept.
Write down the Tracking ID for setup on your website.

Installing Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager

The next thing you have to do is set up Google Analytics on your website. If you’re running WordPress like us, there are three different ways to do this:

Implement the Tracking ID manually in your WordPress theme (only if you know how to code, ask your developer otherwise)
Use a plugin like Monster Insights to add the basic tracking functionality to your website quickly
Take a little longer approach by using Google Tag Manager to implement the tracking ID.

Our preference goes to the last method.

Google Tag manager not only allows you to implement Google Analytics on your website, but it also gives an easy way to deploy and manage all other marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixel, think Facebook Pixel, Snapchat pixel, etc.) to your website without you needing a developer at all.

So head over to Google Tag Manager and signup. Next step is creating a new account by entering an account name and location. Followed by entering the name of your website as the container name and choosing web as the place to use the container.

Pretty straightforward right?

Now accept the Terms of Services of Google Tag Manager, and you’re almost good to go.

Copy the tracking snippet given to you and then most importantly the Google Tag Manager ID (looks like GTM-XXXXXXX).

Using the Google Tag Manager for WordPress plugin, you don’t need to edit any code. Just install the plugin and copy paste the Google Tag Manager ID after activating the plugin and going to the settings.

Now we need to add a tag into the Google Tag Manager, do this by pressing the “New Tag” button.

Then you need to come up with a name, so the tag is easily recognisable for future use. We suggest using “Google Analytics”, but feel free to use whatever you want.

Next step, click on the big button in the “Tag Configuration” to begin the setup. There are a lot of different tags to choose from, but the first one is for “Universal Analytics”, that is the one we want.

To not go into too many details right now, you will keep the “Tracking Type” set for “Pageview”, and then you choose “New Variable…” in the Google Analytics settings.

In the next screen, you can then enter your Tracking ID from the Google Analytics you set up earlier. Google Tag Manager asks you to name the variable for later use in other places, let’s keep that name as it is.

Next, you can click on the “Choose a trigger to make this tag fire…” button. For a basic Google Analytics implementation select “All Pages”.

The final step now to have Google Analytics working on your website and have it execute on every page is hitting the Submit Button (top right corner):

Giving your changes a version name and hit publish. When Google Tag Manager for WordPress is activated with your Google Tag Manager ID, Google Analytics will now be working on your site.

Google Analytics Terminology

Before we go any deeper, let’s first get the fundamental terminology right, this way you can better understand any reporting that Google Analytics throws at you.

What is a User within Google Analytics?

One of the first things you need to know about Google Analytics is what is considered a “user” within GA. For GA an individual that browses your website is called a user. (If you want to get real technical it is a unique browser cookie). It does not matter if a person visits your website only once, or multiple times. For example, one user can create five sessions on your site, and each session has numerous page views.

Since GA uses a unique cookie to identify this person, it means a user is stored to a browser. When someone visits your website using different browsers (on the same machine or different devices), GA will report more than one user.

If you want to identify one person over multiple devices/browsers, you need to use the User ID feature. A User ID is a way to combine sessions from a known person on your website. If you have a way to identify someone (by using an ID from your CRM system for example), you can send that ID to GA, which enables a unique set of cross-device reports. Of course, this works only accurately when you can identify a visitor’s (for example when someone is logged into your website) and won’t work for all visitors.

What are Pageviews?

A Pageview is precisely what you think it would mean, when a User views a page on your website, this will be reported as a Pageview. By default, Google Analytics orders your pages based on the most amounts of views. This helps you to identify which content of yours is viewed more than others.

What are Unique Pageviews?

The problem with Pageviews though is that if a User visits the same page multiple times within the same session, they are all counted as Pageviews. This means that when someone goes back to a previous page after consuming a particular piece of content that the original page is recorded twice as being viewed. Even if the only reason to go back was that they knew there was another link on there that they wanted to explore.

By looking at Unique Pageviews, every page is only counted once within a single session, even if it was viewed multiple times.

How are Pageviews combined into Sessions?

While Pageviews are interesting, it is always interesting to figure out how many Sessions there were on your website. When someone starts on an individual article on your blog, then moves on to the “Homepage” and afterwards to your “About Us” page to find out more information about your company, those three pages are combined into what is called a Session on your website.

So how does this compare to a User and Pageviews? When a person returns a couple of days later and visits five more pages, five more pageviews are recorded in your reporting, there is still only one User, and there are now two Sessions for that User.

What is Bounce Rate?

The Bounce Rate is another very interesting reporting that is important to know about. A Bounce Rate is the percentage of sessions that have only one single Pageview. The Bounce Rate can give you a quick overview of how your content is performing and which content or which pages deserve extra attention. After all, you want your visitors to get down the rabbit hole, consuming more and more content, so they start to see the value of your company and turn into leads.

Don’t forget to put the Bounce Rate into the context of the type of page the Bounce Rate is reporting on. For example, landing pages should have a lower Bounce Rate (because you want people to convert and move to the Thank You page), then maybe your Homepage or a Store Locator.

What is the Acquisition Report in Google Analytics

If you want to figure out how people are finding your website, you will be looking at the Acquisition reports. The Acquisition Report shows you where your visitors are coming from and gives you a report that shows the source, medium and other acquisition dimensions. You can also see traffic from social networks as well as traffic from custom campaign tags.

When you link your Google Search Console, and your Google AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account you can also get dedicated reports around paid traffic and organic traffic.

What is a Referral in Google Analytics

A bit in the same line as the Acquisition Reports are the Referral reports. When someone arrives at your website from another third-party webpage, this will be reported as a Referral. In other words, all the sites that are sending you traffic (by domain) are listed here. If you want you can drill it down to view the “Referral Path”, which gives you an overview of all the individual pages linking to your website.

What are UTM Tags

One of the essential ways you need to start tracking all your Inbound Marketing activity (all the campaigns that you’re doing on other places on the internet that will give traffic back to your website) is by using UTM tags.

You can add extra details at the end of a link your sharing (query parameters), and these additional details will then be included in your Acquisition Reports.

UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module” (the company that invented them and got bought by Google, turning into Google Analytics) and they are the things you can see after a URL in your browser. These extra details are always at the end of a URL you’re sharing and include things like “utm_campaign”, “utm_source”, “utm_medium”, “utm_term”, “utm_content” and “utm_id”.

Campaign Name

The “utm_campaign” is one of the three main dimensions that make up a UTM tag (the others being utm_source and utm_medium). This helps you to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. For example: utm_campaign=spring_sale

Source

“utm_source” is the second one that is important for tagging your URL’s correctly. Source helps you to analyse how people found your website, and it tells you where the campaign is coming from. It can help for example to identify if someone clicks on a link in a newsletter “utm_source=newsletter”, search engine “utm_source=google” or any other place that you’re running a campaign. Combined with the next one “medium”, you can get even more granular insights.

Medium

The last one you need is “utm_medium”. Medium can tell you how the message was communicated to the visitor. For example “utm_medium=cpc” for a cost-per-click campaign, or “utm_medium=affiliate” for an affiliate link.

Term

The “utm_term” and “utm_content” parameters are not mandatory but if used can give you a little bit more extra insights. For example, the “utm_term” parameter is used for tracking your keywords during a paid AdWords campaign. You can also use it in your display ad campaigns to identify aspects of your audience. For example “utm_term=running+shoes”

Content

“utm_content” finally is being used when you’re running A/B tests on your ads. It is a useful metric that can pass details about the version people clicked on and as a result, can help you which version is more effective than the other. For example “utm_content=logolink” or “utm_content=textlink”

Turning Google Analytics into valuable, actionable information

Being able to collect all of this data is great, but at one point it can become a bit overwhelming.

Do you know exactly what to look for when you read analytics data? Let’s have a look into how we can get the most out of the data and turn it into valuable, actionable information.

Setting up goals for important conversions on your site.

When setting up Google Analytics for the first time, it is more than just adding the tracker on your website.

If you want to get the most out of your installation, you need to start setting up goals. Goals allow you to see how many visitors are taking action, converting into leads, subscribers and customers. You can see what sources of traffic are sending visitors that are most likely to convert, and which pages are the most convincing.

So what are Goals exactly? According to Google:

Goals measure how well your site or app fulfills your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. Examples of goals include making a purchase (for an ecommerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).

Defining goals is a fundamental component of any digital analytics measurement plan. Having properly configured goals allows Analytics to provide you with critical information, such as the number of conversions and the conversion rate for your site or app. Without this information, it’s almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your online business and marketing campaigns.

In other words, goals measure how and when people complete specific actions that you want them to complete.

There are four different types of goals you can use to track your content marketing results:

Setting up goals requires that your first figure out, what is essential for your business? What goal do you want your visitors to achieve on your site?

Here are a few ideas that might get you started:

Email list sign-ups
Webinar registrations
White paper downloads
Contact form completions
Views of a specific page

Don’t go too crazy though, Google only limits you to 20 per account, and that is for a good reason.

Every goal that you’re adding will add an extra column in a lot of reports. And to much data will make you lose sight of your main objectives. Start off with one or two, and slowly add more over time when you think they are needed.

To create a new goal, click on “Admin” in the left panel, then in the “View” column, click on Goals. Simply press the “+New Goal button“, and you’re off.

Most of your goals you want your visitors to end up on a specific destination, after all when someone converts they end up on a Thank You page and that is considered a conversion.

Creating redirects to pages like this can quickly be done within Inbound Rocket, by setting up the form type to post and going to a specific page after.

The slug of this page is the destination you need to enter as the Destination URL in your goal, and you’re all good to go.

If needed, you can create a monetary value to the conversion. For example, if you’re setting up the goal for tracking e-commerce transactions, you can specify the goal value to measure the revenue each transaction generates.

Aligning your goals across the Buyers Journey to what you can track

Understanding your customers, Buyers Journey is crucial if you want to develop strategic marketing tactics that are working. Thankfully Google Analytics offers many powerful functions to measure customer behaviour, allowing you to learn from this and respond accordingly.

The moment you start to understand how your customers are behaving and what they are looking for, you can develop the content to meet their needs at every stage of the journey.

So now that you know how to set up goals, let’s start aligning your goals with the different phases of the Buyers Journey, so you can track your entire conversion funnel.

Topics and reports to think about here are:

Awareness

Traffic by Channel/Medium
Traffic by Content Grouping
Traffic by Author, Topic, Word Count, Date Published

Engagement

Content Downloads
Watched Video
Newsletter Signups
Email marketing traffic
Retargeting Trafic

Conversion

Lead & Contact Forms
eCommerce Transaction
Average Order Value
App Downloads
Software Trials
Conversions by Content Type

Retention

Repeat Revenue
Content consumption by logged in Users
Product Reviews

By using the reports, Google Analytics has combined with custom Goals you can understand your potential customers or leads better and more effectively, steer them in the direction of a satisfied customer and keep them there.

Using Site Search

One of the easiest way to help your visitors on your site and to keep them on your site is by offering a search bar.

There can also be a time when your site is somehow not optimised enough, and they can’t find what they are looking for; a search bar can help them stay on your site. On top of that, it can also provide valuable insights for you.

Google Analytics can help you tap into this data through its on-site search terms report. By using this report, you can quickly review which keywords people are searching for on your site. It might be that you were targeting the complete wrong keywords and your visitors are using different keywords to describe their problems. By comparing what you were initially thinking to the search terms, they are using you can identify if you’re on the right track.

Or maybe there is a missed opportunity for some new pieces of content you can work on? After all, you know exactly what your customers are searching for, so it can identify additional content you can create that drives more traffic and builds more engagement.

When setting up correctly you can use the information to:

target the search result pages with specific campaigns (especially if they are converting well)
create better internal links so that the high-traffic pages allow to deliver more traffic to lesser performing pages
restructure your website to make specific content more accessible to find
identify topics and keywords you can use in content creation

Setting this up correctly is quite easy in Google Analytics. Like setting up goals, click on Admin in the left panel, click View Settings and then enable Site search Tracking:

Then, just below the slider, you’ll see a field to enter a Query parameter. The “query parameter” is the letter that appears in the URL to identify a search is happening. (Like the UTM tags). If you’re running WordPress, the default value is “?s=“ so the letter s is what you need to put as the query parameter. Try testing it on your website to see how the URL looks when you search for something.

The last step to do is checking the box “Strip query parameter out of URL” If you don’t select this option than Google Analytics will start to split up the same searches from different pages. For example, you will begin to see separate listings for mycomany.com/searchresultpage?s=1 and mycompany.com/searchresultpage?s=2.

When you tell GA to “strip query parameters out of URL” it will just track all those visits together as mycompany.com/searchresultpage, while still being able to see the internal searches when viewing your site search data.

After you hit save, you can start seeing the results coming in for your site in Google Analytics under “Behaviour” > “Site Search” > “Search Terms”. If no results are produced while searching on your site, those terms will be shown as no-results: keyword.

Identifying and Filtering Internal Traffic from Google Analytics

Depending on the size of your business, employees browsing your website can cause some severe issues in your Google Analytics reporting. People at your company don’t act like a typical visitor on your site, and as a result alter the metrics that are reported most of the times, like users, sessions and Pageviews.

On top of that, they affect probably the most important metrics for your organisation, the conversion rate and attribution reporting in your goals. These can directly impact budgeting, bid strategies for ads and all sorts of other business decisions.

The best thing for you to do is create a filtered view within Google Analytics so that these internal visits are not messing up your data.

The easiest way to do this is to create an IP address filter in GA. But before you can do that, you first need to figure out what your IP address is, just head over to https://www.whatismyip.com/ or do a Google search for “what is my IP address.”

Now we go to our Google Analytics, choose Admin in the left column and then from the Account column select All Filters, Then, click +Add Filter.

You can give your Filter a name like “Internal Traffic Filter”. You can leave the Filter Type as predefined, select Exclude from the Select filter type drop-down. In Select source or destination, “select traffic from the IP addresses” and finally chose “that are equal to”.

In the input box below you can then enter the IP Address you found earlier, and then the only thing left to do is to “Apply Filter to Views” section, where you select “All Website Data” and then click the Add button. Hit save, and you’re good to go.

From now on all visitors internal within your company are complete ignored.

If you still want to be able to make sure that the original data is still saved, the best thing to do before setting up a filter is to create a new view just for this filter. This way you will have the raw data and filtered data available for you. To do that,

Click “Admin“, and navigate to the account and property to which you want to add the view.
In the VIEW column, click the menu, then click “Create new view“.
Select either Web Site or App.
Enter a Name (like filtered view). (Use a specific and descriptive name, so you can easily tell what data is in this view when you see the name in a list.)
Select the Reporting Time Zone. (If your Analytics account is linked to a Google AdWords account, the time zone is automatically set to your AdWords preference, and you won’t see this option.)

See which pages hold people’s attention the longest.

Probably the report that holds the most important clues about which pieces of content your visitors love is the “Average Time on Page” report. In some ways, this is a more accurate measurement of interest than the report on which pages get the most traffic. Especially if you’re running an advertisement campaign going to a specific page, or when some of your pages are ranking well and driving in a ton of organic traffic.

To see the “Average Time on Page” and rank your pages according to the time on their page, go to “Reporting” > “Behaviour”. In the expanded menu click on “Site Content” > “All Pages”.

In the column on the right you can see the different pages people are visiting and if you click on “Average Time on Page”, the list will automatically sort for you by time on page.

Other interesting sorts you can do on this page as soon as your Goal Data is starting to flow in, is sorting by Page Value. This will give you the insights into which pieces are the most interesting for your visitors and which pieces of content are in serious need of attention for some updates.

Finding slow loading page to optimise your site speed

The last reporting we want to focus on here is the reporting to identify slow loading pages. According to Google, most of the websites out there are too slow.

2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.” Maile Ohye – Google

In other words, when most websites are ranking above nine-seconds, your visitors are already gone before they have even seen your content.

As of July 2018 page speed is a ranking factor in mobile search.

Thankfully using Google Analytics, you can figure out which specific pages on your site are loading the slowest and need some improvement. This information combined which pages are getting the most traffic should give you enough information to figure out which pages you need to start optimising first.

To see the site speed of individual pages, go to “Reporting” > “Behaviour”. In the expanded menu click on “Site Speed” > “Page Timings”.

This report quickly shows you all of your pages on-site, grouped by page load time. Want to know how you can improve them? Just under “Page Timings” in the left-hand menu, you can find “Speed Suggestions”, showing you some great tips to get started.

Advanced Google Analytics reporting

The final item we want to focus on is a little bit more advanced but can give you great insights into finding your most popular content based on the categories and the tags associated with them.

The way to do that is called Content Grouping. According to Google, Content Grouping is:

Content Grouping lets you, group, content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site or app, and then view and compare aggregated metrics by group name in addition to being able to drill down to the individual URL, page title, or screen name. For example, you can see the aggregated number of Pageviews for all pages in a group like Men/Shirts, and then drill in to see each URL or page title.

So how to use Content Grouping to determine your most popular content?

Using Content Grouping to determine your popular content

It all starts by navigating to Admin and then under the View column you can select “Content Grouping”. Click “+New Content Grouping” and name the first group “Post Categories”.

Under “Group by Tracking Code” click “Enable Tracking Code” and write down the number under “Select Index” (unless you’ve already done this before for something else, this should be “1”). Click “Done” and then “Save”.

Repeat the same step, only call it “Post Tags” and write down the index number (probably “2”).

Since we’ve already set up Google Tag Manager, in the beginning, to enable Google Analytics on our website, all we now have to do is head over to Google Tag Manager.

Choose your Account and click on your “Google Analytics Settings”.

Under the “variable configuration,” you click on “More Settings” > “Content Groups” > “+Add Content Group”.

Enter “1” as the “Index” and then click on the icon on the right of “Content Group”. Hit the plus sign in the top right corner for “New Variable”.

Name the variable “Post Categories” and select “Data Layer Variable” as the “Type”, enter “pageCategory” as the “Data Layer Variable Name” and click save.

Repeat these steps only this time name the variable “Post Tags” and the name for the “Data Layer Variable” is “pageAttributes”.

After that click “Continue” and select “All Pages” under “Fire On” and click “Create Tag” in case that is not selected yet.

Now we head over to your WordPress site and go to the Google Tag Manager plugin we installed earlier. Under the “Basic data” tab, make sure that both “Category list of current post/archive” and “Tags of current post” are selected.

By doing this, we store extra pieces of information in a Data Layer on your blog posts. The post categories and tags can now be used within Google Tag manager for more advanced data collection and reporting.

The final step will be to publish the changes you made in Google Tag Manager.

From now un in Google Analytics, under “Behaviour” > “Site Content” > “All Pages” you will have the option to select information from your content groupings.

In other words, you can now figure out what are the most visited content categories, and tags that you’re visitors are finding most interesting. It gives you the ability to understand how certain content is performing based on the categories and tags.

Although it is a bit of a top-level view, it can be powerful to quickly understand your top performing content. And as a result, it can help you focus on those topics that your visitors seem to love most.

Google Analytics is an enormous data wonder, and it holds lots of vital data about your website and how it is performing. Best of all, it offers all this data to you for free.

As you can see it all starts with a correct implementation though, and from there, there are many different ways to evaluate the performance of your content marketing.

Just using standard reports like the amounts of pageviews is not enough if you truly want to move your business forward.

If you learn what kind of questions you need to ask for your business, you can start to evaluate your content marketing efforts.

After all, if you don’t measure your content marketing strategy, you don’t what is and what isn’t working.

How do you use Google Analytics to improve your (content) marketing strategy? Drop us a reaction in the comments below; we’d love to hear from you.

Sourced from usergrowth

In News

3 Blogging Best Practices for Business

May 24, 2019 No Comments

By Laura Hill

An essential part of an effective content marketing program, blogging is a great way to accomplish several of your marketing goals at once.

Need fresh content for your website? Post a blog. Want to establish yourself as a subject matter expert? Write a blog that demonstrates your mastery. Need high-quality content for social media that drives traffic to your website? What about writing you can repurpose for email marketing? Yep. Blogs.

Aren’t there already a ton of blogs out there? Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean you’re too late to start leveraging this very effective tool. Here are some helpful guidelines, so the time you spend on your blog will return the highest return on your investment!

Our top 3 tips for business blogging

1. Provide value

Give prospective customers a real reason to make the jump to your content on the website. Write about topics that are relevant to your audience, whether they are timely or evergreen. A good place to start is with questions you are frequently asked about your services or products. These are questions people will be using on search engines, using keywords that relate directly to your business, making it even more likely you will be found online!

2. Keep it interesting

Make the text easily scannable by breaking up large blocks of text with attractive white space, and adding pictures, videos, and links. Need quality sources for free or low cost images? Create your own using graphic design tools or try free photo sites that provide a natural range of people in current and realistic settings.

3. Connect your blog to your website

Hopefully, by sharing links to your blog through social media and email marketing, and by being found during online search, you will be driving traffic directly to your blog. HubSpot recommends making sure your blog is directly connected to your business website, either as a subdomain (blog.yourdomain.com) or as a page (yourdomain.com/blog) so visitors can easily access additional information about your company.

Reviving a blogging program or starting a new one?

Beginning a blogging program (or restarting a dormant one) can be intimidating and overwhelming. Listen to your customers and clients to learn what topics they are interested in, and follow these best practices to make the time you spend blogging more rewarding and effective.

By Laura Hill

Sourced from BreezyHill

In News

How to make content marketing work – practical tips for success

May 20, 2019 No Comments

By Barb Mosher Zinck

SUMMARY: Some guidance on effective content marketing from a long-time practitioner.

Sarah Bottorff understands how content marketing can help build a brand. She should do as she’s done it for several SaaS companies, including her current company, FastSpring where she is VP for Marketing.

For example, Bottorff was previously brought in to build out a marketing team at AppFolio for a new legal product offering. AppFolio had built their company through a strong focus on content marketing. Bottorff took those learnings and applied them to their new legal practice management solution, MyCase, making it the number two legal practice management software at the time.

That was just the start. Bottorff took her content marketing skills to Smokeball, another company offering cloud-based legal practice management software. When she joined them, Smokeball was a sales-driven company. It didn’t do content marketing, opting instead to send a monthly email to its database.

Bottorff was able to show execs how content marketing that provided thought leadership would add real value around using their software better. It helped the firm’s customers to focus their efforts on being great attorneys, not great business software people.

With FastSpring, she has brought that same mindset of using content marketing to help customers be even better at what they do. In this case, FastSpring provides SaaS-based digital commerce solutions to small to mid-sized companies selling digital software (e.g., subscription software, payment, and billing, back office capabilities, etc.). Through content marketing, FastSpring helps customers improve how their customers sell their software.

A few examples from the FastSpring blog: 7 Ways to Use Video to Increase Conversion Rates, How To Write Great Product Descriptions That Convert, and Subscription Finance: What is Monthly Recurring Revenue? These blog posts are not about FastSpring’s products; they instead provide guidance and best practices on how to increase sales and understand the sales management part of their business better.

It’s fair to say that Bottorff understands the value that content marketing can bring to a company – if you make your customers successful, you will be successful.

So what is the advice she gives?

Tips for great content marketing

The first thing is to build a strong team with dedicated roles and responsibilities, saya Bottorff. Content marketing is a shared responsibility, but without clearly defined roles and responsibilities, a content marketing program will not thrive.

The most important role is the owner of the content program. The owner identifies drivers and pain points. They do this by working with the product team to understand what they are developing and why, as well as talking to customers to understand pain points and gaps. Interviews are a huge component of any content marketing program. With all this information in hand, the content owner develops a comprehensive program.

Another important element of a solid content program is SEO. As Bottorff points out, it’s fine to create content, but you need the right people to find it. Then there’s design, and by design, Bottorff doesn’t just mean how the content looks, but how easily digestible it is and how it’s displayed. Then, of course, there’s the quality writing and the topics that lend great thought leadership that people want to consume.

As to where content marketing fits within the company, Bottorff argues that it should be integrated and work across the company – in product planning and the roadmap, customer success and the sales team. Every team has a role to play in what content to develop. The key to building successful relationships across these teams is reciprocity. For example, Bottorff says the product team works with the content marketing team because the new features they develop will get exposure. For sales, it is about ensuring they get the resources and assets they need.

Building a content library

When it comes to building the content library, Bottorff takes a slightly different perspective. Yes, you need to define the customer journey and build content to support that journey. But for Bottorff’s company, which is a pay-per-performance business, employees are incentivised to help their customers optimize their websites and their businesses.

What her team does is develop content that enables companies to get to the next level of their business. So they offer advice on optimizing their websites, including improving their content, and how to leverage different content assets, like webinars or videos.

Bottorff says FastSpring has similar challenges to their customers, so they have a good handle on the concepts and can put more resources into developing thought leadership content that their customers need.

For example, FastSpring sends prospects personalized videos where a Sales/Support person speaks to the prospect on screen, shows them their website and makes suggestions to improve it. They then show how if you plugged in FastSpring APIs, you could improve the experience in different ways. These are just informative enough to make the prospect see the value and want to know more.

Bottorff likens the videos to a cooking show where you can see the final product to help you understand the value of the effort you need to put into making it.

My take

Bottorff makes the point that content marketing is all about the experience and that you need to provide content in an easily digestible manner. Content must be useful and that requires you to understand your market well, not only in terms of what content to provide, but also how to provide it and where.

Feature Image Credit – Freeimages/Alan Aycock

By Barb Mosher Zinck

Sourced from diginomica

In News

Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Failing? How to Know and What to Do

April 12, 2019 No Comments

By Jeff Shuford

You have crafted your blog strategy, painstakingly laid out an editorial calendar, and spent countless hours (and perhaps precious cash) creating blog posts for your business. How do you know if your effort is paying off? You can determine whether your content marketing strategy is failing or succeeding with a few simple steps.

Start by Understanding Your Goals

First and most importantly, understand the goal of your blog. Is it designed to establish thought leadership for your brand, generate leads, build up your social following, better understand your audience, etc.? It may sound obvious, but specifying your goals is a necessary first step prior to analyzing whether you’re achieving them.

Use Google Analytics for Fundamental User Metrics

Analysing Google Analytics (GA) trends is a good place to start when monitoring your content quality. GA is a free, richly featured, powerful analytics tool provided by Google. Setup is as simple as installing a snippet of code in your global site header. Once installed, GA will provide a wealth of information on user behaviour on each page of your blog. You can obtain this information by navigating to “Content,” and then “User Behaviour,” and then filtering by “blog.”

There are a few key stats to pay attention to in GA. You’ll want to monitor the following across all posts and for individual posts:

• Pageviews indicate whether your topics and headlines are interesting and SEO friendly and whether your blog posts are being shared socially. Pageviews are affected by a variety of factors such as content quantity, content quality, and promotion on social platforms and in email newsletters.

• Bounce Rate & Exit Rate help you understand whether users are proceeding to other posts after reading a given article. A Bounce occurs when a user’s first-page view on your site was also their last. An Exit indicates that a user left your site after viewing a given page. These metrics tend to be a measure of your content quality, and also how well you are cross-promoting your other blog or site content.

Layer in Social Sharing Behaviour

Next, you’ll want to understand the virality (defined as “the tendency of an image, video, or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another”) of your content. The primary reason for this is to understand overall sharing behaviour, but a close second is to understand how your content is shared on various social platforms. You might be surprised to find, for example, that your content is more likely to be shared on Facebook than on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Share count alone won’t tell you much, however, without factoring in the number of page views. The not-so-obvious key metric that is truly indicative of content virality is Share-to-Pageview ratio. This metric indicates if your content topic was interesting and the quality was good; or to put it another way, whether the content delivered value based on the expectations set by the title of the post.

Look for trends in the data

Now that you’ve created a content dashboard, you can analyse the overall effectiveness of your blog, and more importantly the effectiveness of individual posts. In a short period of time, you will be able to identify trends that will inform your future content creation and allow you to understand the impact of factors such as content quality, quantity, and promotion on your content page views and shares.

Examples of content trends in the dashboard:

• Topics – Which topics or themes tend to resonate with your audience? You’ll likely want to create more content on these topics or themes in the future. Conversely, content that seems to be of little interest to your audience can be removed from your future editorial calendar.

• Titles – Do certain title styles resonate more with your audience? Some audiences may prefer a straightforward title, while others may prefer a listicle format, like top 10 lists, and others may prefer teaser-style headlines. Identifying title trends will help you make sure future content is more likely to be read by your audience.

• Authors – Perhaps certain authors have higher pageview and shares than others. When that happens, make sure you are maintaining a good relationship with the successful authors, and consider increasing the frequency of their posts.

These are merely a few examples of trends to illustrate the power of maintaining a blog dashboard. You will likely identify other trends relevant to your specific business and blog.

Following these straightforward steps, you should be able to move forward on your blog strategy with confidence. Updating and review the dashboard with your content team once per week will ensure that your blog is tailored for your audience and that your content’s quality, quantity, and discover-ability are meeting your expectations.

Feature Image Credit: (iStock/RichVintage)

By Jeff Shuford

Sourced from Black Enterprise

In News

How Content Drives Brand-Trust

April 11, 2019 No Comments

By Chad Pollitt

According to the Content Marketing Institute, on average, it takes six to eight online content touches from a brand for a consumer to become a customer. Some industries can take up to 18, according to Google. Why?

There’s a dozen or so micro-reasons we can likely come up with but what it boils down to is one word – trust. Each time a consumer is exposed to a brand’s content (owned, earned or paid) that person becomes more familiar with the brand. Over time, with enough touches, a trust threshold gets breached and the likelihood of that person becoming a customer is optimized. Of course, this is assuming the content is good/helpful.

That’s precisely why we do content marketing today and why many companies started to do it last decade. Although, admittedly, some used it as an SEO tactic originally, myself included. These brands are what Marcus Sheridan calls “digital sooners.” These are the companies that started doing content marketing last decade in a time of online content deficits. Meaning: there were more people on the web searching for solutions to their problems then there was content to solve them.

This was all well and good for those brands and most were able to drive copious amounts of traffic, visibility and awareness. Many still benefit from this today. Unfortunately, the sooner land rush is long gone for most brands. The rush since last decade has created what most industries are facing today – content surpluses. Meaning: there’s more content on the Internet today than there are people that want to consume it. To put this in prospective, according to Cisco, in 2007 global Internet traffic was about 2,000 GB per second. It’s estimated to be over 105K GB per second by 2021.

Clearly, it’s getting harder and harder everyday to stand out in the crowd with these content surpluses. As marketers we used to be able to hit the publish button on our content and the search engines and social media would drive all of the touches we needed to build consumer trust for our brands. That’s not likely a reality for most companies today.

As a result, we’ve been forced to leverage earned and paid media distribution tactics to get the content touches we need today. In fact, it’s highly likely that content marketing caused the rise of both influencer marketing and native advertising. It had to in our age of content surpluses.

Both distribution tactics lend themselves well to helping build brand trust. It’s not just the content touch itself that builds trust, but rather, the delivery method. If an independent third party writes wonderful things about a brand it screams validation much louder than a brand could do itself. The same holds true with native advertising. Even if a brand pays the New York Times for sponsored content that content is still in the New York Times. That on its own is a huge trust factor.

Content marketers have a guiding light at the top of the pyramid – build trust with consumers. People only go to the web for two reasons – to solve a problem or to be entertained, quickly. Marketers who do one of those two things or both will drive the touches they need to succeed with the help of content amplification and influencer marketing, today. Last decade isn’t coming back and the era of content surpluses is here to stay.

Lastly, television executives spend $5.00 on distribution for every $1.00 they spend on creation. Based on my own research, content marketers do the opposite. This has to change if we want the touches we need to optimize consumers to potential customers.

By Chad Pollitt

Sourced from inPower

In News

How to Use Content Marketing for PR and Social Media Success

March 15, 2019 No Comments

By Wendy Marx

The value of content marketing for PR and social media has become a slam dunk when it comes to digital marketing. And as new networks and platforms emerge, it becomes even more essential.

And if we had any doubts, a new study from Brunswick shows that investors and analysts are making decisions based on the digital content of executives and companies.

The consultancy’s annual Digital Investor Survey tracks the digital behavior of investors and analysts around the world in terms of communications, research and information-gathering.

How Important Is a Digital Presence?

In a word…Crucial.

For instance, according to the survey, 90% of investors use digital platforms and channels to investigate companies and the issues surrounding them. Another 70% reported that they have made investment decisions based on digital research. These statistics prove a direct link between your content and communications and how willing people are to invest in your brand — aka, your bottom line.

You can almost guarantee that others who are looking to do business with your company will do the same. You need a digital presence to greet them at the door, so to speak, and give them a good first impression of your company.

And we do not mean just a static website. We are talking about a rich digital identity that make your brand stand out, such as a regular blog, social media presence, and search engine optimization.

“Building an effective individual digital profile is not just an essential component in a successful investor relations strategy, it is now a necessity for maintaining shareholder value and competing with peers that are more active in digital and social media,” Brunswick partner Marshall Manson told the Holmes Report.

If your brand is not available on a digital platform, such as a blog, to not mince words — you’re impacting your bottom line.

“As an industry we’ve always wondered, Mason continued, “but the research makes it absolutely clear: there’s a line between great communications and business performance.”

What Should You Do?

Knowing the crucial role of digital marketing, it’s essential to maintain your digital marketing and social media channels. Which translates to solidifying your content marketing.

Search engines and online publishers like blogs are the most used digital sources for investors. Social media platforms are also important with LinkedIn the favorite with 63% of investors using the platform for research, and Twitter the second most used platform at 55% of investors.

Wherever you go on the internet, you can’t ignore the role that content plays — whether it’s a blog shared on social media, visual graphics in your PR campaigns, or a video that you use to promote your brand across multiple channels. All of this and more falls under the content umbrella.

But this involves more than just creating content. You need to pay attention to content marketing trends, from blogs to social media, to public relations and ROI.

Brunswick provides three recommendations for communicators:

Ensure senior executives use digital and social to reach and engage investors, particularly LinkedIn.
Expand your digital universe to include podcasts, which are underutilized.
Maintain your SEO and content materials.

To give your content marketing a leg up for social media and public relations, we’ve expanded these three areas into 4 easy ways for you to

We’ve laid out 4 easy ways to use content marketing for social media and public relations. These methods will help you strengthen your communications strategy.

4 Ways to Use Content Marketing for PR and Social Media

1. Write and Maintain a Blog

For the past decade, businesses and entrepreneurs have been urged to maintain a regular blog. Not only does it show evidence of expertise, but it also directs people back to your brand time and time again.

And we now have even more proof of the value of blogging. The Brunswick survey showed that 61% of investors and analysts used blogs to make investment decisions and recommendations.

Blogging helps to boost your digital presence, not just on your site, but also on social. For instance, it gives you original content to post on your social media profiles. This original content bolsters your reputation and points your audience back to your website for more original content.

Note: Because of the very visual nature of social media, you need to include visual graphics when you post to social media. This includes blog images, infographics, and even videos to attract your audience.

Your blog is one of the top places where you can promote all of your media gems. This includes media interviews, major company-wide news, and awards. It is a great in-house platform to allow your audience to share in your brand’s triumphs. As a side perk, posting this kind of news strengthens your reputation as a top-shelf brand.

2. Invest in SEO

Search engines are one of the most heavily-used platforms for research — as proved by the 65% of people who use it to research investment opportunities, according to Brunswick. This makes sense, since who hasn’t tapped into engines like Google or Bing to find answers to questions or learn more about a brand?

Because of the heavily-guarded algorithms that ensure top-quality content on search engines. these platforms have gained a level of trust that few other platforms match. In fact, in Brunswick’s survey, search engines were trusted slightly less than The New York Times but above CNN when it came to trust.

Audiences know that not just any joe-blow with a computer can make his or her way onto that first page slot — it takes domain authority, link-building, and other strategies to get there.

SEO is a crucial part of today’s content marketing trends — and can be used to empower your PR and social media. Think of your latest bit of news or your campaign. When you build up your site’s authority through SEO and use the right keywords, you have the potential to expand your visibility and gain the trust of your audience.

3. Create a Podcast

Brunswick’s survey reported that 48% of investors said that they used podcasts for information about a brand. But sadly, podcasts are often forgotten when we discuss content marketing trends and strategies. And what a loss that is.

Podcasts were listed as the third most popular content (after search engines and blogs) used to make investment decisions.

While podcasts are among the most powerful pieces of content a brand can produce, they are also one of the most under-utilized. As a brand, you should give serious consideration to how podcasts could fit into your

Podcasts are a great place to promote your PR and social media. For instance, why not discuss a subject on your podcast and point your audience to your social media profile for more information? Have some company news or a PR campaign that you would like to promote? Use your podcast to get your audience excited about it.

4. Leverage LinkedIn in Your Strategy

In the past, many brands have relegated their LinkedIn maintenance to their HR teams. But what once started as a simple professional networking site has blossomed into a lot more.

Brands are realizing the far-reaching value of LinkedIn in the business landscape. It is now used as a publishing platform, to share company news, and as a place where prospective buyers and investors vet companies.

What makes LinkedIn so valuable? It’s trust factor. Indeed, Brunswick reports it to be the most trusted social network with a score of +26, which is on par with media outlets like CNBC. In an age where fake news is talked about seemingly all the time, this shows just how valuable LinkedIn is as a platform and a resource for your brand.

And if you’re still not convinced, consider that 48% percent of investors said that they used LinkedIn as part of their research into companies.

Take the time to familiarize yourself with LinkedIn’s best practices. This includes engaging with groups and communities and publishing regular content on the network’s publishing platform.

By Wendy Marx

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

4 simple (yet brilliant) ways to nurture leads without being ‘pushy’

March 6, 2019 No Comments

By Nathan Resnick

Nurturing leads along the buyer’s journey and turning them into paying customers is a vital part of successful entrepreneurship — but it’s often easier said than done…

Go too long without following up with a prospective client, and they may forget about you altogether. But follow up too often, and your pushiness might just push them away and cause you to lose a big sales opportunity.

Needless to say, marketers need to find the right balance when it comes to nurturing leads. Despite your best efforts, not every lead will become a lifelong customer. But when you use these surprisingly simple tactics, you’ll be far more likely to close the sale and increase your marketing return on investment.

1) Leverage the power of scarcity

I’ve written previously on the power of scarcity in marketing, and this idea of creating a sense of urgency among prospective buyers can be just as applicable when trying to nurture a sales lead.

After all, there’s a big difference between sending an email that says “Your offer is still waiting” and one that says “Your offer expires in 24 hours!” Essentially, tapping into the fear of missing out can prove more persuasive than merely trying to convince someone of the benefits of buying your product.

Be mindful of the expense and commitment purchasing your product or service would entail. Though scarcity can be powerful, be careful to not overemphasize it to the point that you miss out on customers who might want a slightly longer period to make their decision.

This is especially likely when customers would be signing up for a year-long subscription or paying several thousand dollars for your service. Scarcity tactics are typically most effective with lower-cost items, but they can still increase sales of more expensive services when balanced with the right type of offer.

2) Unleash content marketing

When deliberating over a buying decision, prospective customers have a tendency to want to gather as much information as possible. Chances are, they don’t want to hear a bland sales pitch. They want direct answers to their questions. They want to know just how your product or service works, and how it addresses their specific needs.

While testimonials and online reviews will certainly help your customers make a decision, you will go a long way in building trust if you provide helpful information through your own content marketing efforts. Conversational and relevant content, such as case studies or how-to’s, will give your leads confidence in your product or service.

Of course, you can’t just post a few blog articles to your own site. Delivering this content through as many channels as possible is crucial for leads to find and benefit from it.

Management software tools can simplify this process by allowing you to schedule out blog and social media posts in advance. This scheduling will then make it easier for your sales team to send email updates when content relevant to a particular lead has gone live.

3) Connect through webinars

While you might be able to answer some of your leads’ questions through your content marketing materials, you shouldn’t count on everyone finding your company blog.

Webinars are a great alternative form of delivering content to your leads that can help you answer questions or even demo your product in an engaging, interactive setting. This long-form content can be highly effective — according to ClickMeeting’s “State of Webinars” report, an incredible 76 percent of B2B buyers use webinars to research a company purchase.

During these live video streams, you can also discuss key pain points your product or service addresses to help leads more strongly consider making a purchase. You can also use Q&A sessions to alleviate customer concerns or even get future content ideas.

I’ve learned that reliable webinar tools can make all the difference for your success in using this content delivery channel. Look for tools that will let you set up a customized webinar with only a few clicks while also offering a reliable video stream and useful statistics. This way, you can focus more of your time and energy on providing great content through the event, rather than worrying about setting up the video stream.

4) Offer a limited free trial

You can share testimonials and in-depth articles, but for many leads, the best way to make a decision is to experience your product or service first-hand.

Case studies have found that as many as 40 to 60 percent of free trial users for SaaS products eventually become paying customers. A free trial gives potential customers the chance to fully experience what it would be like using the service so they can make a more informed decision and have confidence when they buy.

When someone signs up for a free trial of your service, they immediately signal themselves as a highly qualified lead. This instantly indicates to your sales team that someone is more interested in your product, and as a result, customized followup messages are less likely to come across as pushy.

Better still, free trials can help you collect customer feedback to further improve your services.

Nurturing toward success

With the right messaging and the right mix of communication tools, you can become far more effective at closing leads than if you simply bombarded them with emails day after day.

By using these lead nurturing tactics to guide qualified leads through the buying process, you’ll achieve higher sales rates and avoid coming across as pushy or obnoxious.

This post is part of our contributor series. The views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily shared by TNW.

By Nathan Resnick

Sourced from TNW

In News

5 Low-Cost Visual Creation Tools to Help Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts

February 20, 2019 No Comments

By Lilian Sue

When you’re working on promoting your next campaign, you should consider adding a visual punch to make it more enticing, so it stands out in busy user feeds.

It’s been proven time and time again that people are more likely to engage with posts which contain photos and/or videos, because the visual aspect makes the post more interesting to read. But if you’re on a budget, it can be tough to justify paying for platforms like Photoshop, especially if you don’t plan to use it frequently and/or don’t have a graphic designer in house.

That’s why I’m sharing some of the most popular inexpensive and/or free marketing tools to help you create stunning visuals to attract buyers, engage fans and make events and campaigns more memorable.

1. Canva

By far one of the most popular visual tools online today, Canva has a free version available which enables you to create various image types and gives you a taste of the full app. Canva facilitates a range of visual options – from infographics, e-books and Facebook ads to email headers – and you don’t need to be a graphic designer to use it. It’s an intuitive visual platform which even novices can use, and it includes an extensive selection of stock photos and other elements.

You’re also able to upload your own logos and images to the platform and incorporate them into your own designs. There are templates available if you’re looking for something more structured and several photo enhancing tools for any touch-ups you need.

2. Crello

Another popular option which is free to sign up for is Crello. The app has over 65 million free stock images, and over 10,000 free design templates, while there are more advanced design elements available for around $1/each.

Anyone can sign up and get started on the pre-loaded templates right away – they have designs for print, social media, animations, digital ads and just about anything you can think of that will work for events, e-newsletters and blogs. The app also has a community page with ideas from members, which will definitely help to get your creativity flowing.

3. Animoto

An affordable platform you can use to easily turn photos, graphics, and video clips into animated video slideshows, Animoto starts with a free two0week trial, with the paid version starting at $13/month.

The basic package gives you access to over 700+ styles, and 500 music tracks. It’s a platform that works to create great short-form videos for Facebook and Instagram, as it can easily convert the slideshow to the square format.

You can add any images, clips and text you see fit, then save and share to your respective platforms.

4. Infogr.am

This platform enables you to publish charts and infographics through a variety of templates. You can add charts, maps, videos, images and anything else you want, and share it with the one-click (or embed it into your blog).

With the free plan, you’re given access to 37+ interactive charts, but if you move up to the pro plan (for $19/month), that expands to 500+ map types, 100 projects, 10 pages/project, privacy control and the ability to download HD images.

5. Lumen5

Lumen5 can turn your blog posts, articles and any other long-form content into videos – you simply upload the text into the platform, choose some photos and music, and then you can share it directly to Facebook or upload it to share wherever you like.

The free version enables you to create unlimited videos, and upload your own logo and photos for the videos you create. It also gives you access to 10,000,000+ free media files.

With a pro account (at $49/month), you’ll get all the same, plus the ability to upload your own watermark and outro with square videos, no credit scene and Lumen5 branding

These are just some of the many low-cost visual tools available to help improve your online presentation. Each tool offers something different, so it’s worth experimenting with what you can to find the right fit for your business needs.

By Lilian Sue

Follow Lilian Sue on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

In News

11 Trends That Will Shape Marketing In 2019

February 4, 2019 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

Building brand awareness and successfully interacting with consumers is a crucial part of doing business today. Customers enjoy and expect a personalized experience, and delivering just that will set you apart from your competition.

Voice search and live videos were just two of the methods marketers explored to improve consumer interactions and brand awareness in 2018. As innovations in technology and ideas come forward, 2019 is also sure to see its share of trends having an impact on marketing. Below, 11 Forbes Agency Council members shared their predictions for the year ahead.

Members of Forbes Agency Council offer insights on what marketing trends to expect in 2019.Photos courtesy of the individual members.

1. A Bigger Role For AI In Personalization And Automation

We are all watching the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing and how it affects our clients’ relationships with consumers. As a company that focuses on bringing out emotional connections through physical environments, we’ll see AI play an even bigger role for brands as they look to personalize and automate more digital and traditional communications. – Jessica Reznick, We’re Magnetic

2. Smart Speaker Advertising Opportunities

Smart speakers and voice assistant devices are more affordable than ever before, making them a huge potential marketing tool in the upcoming year. As the relationship between big tech and the consumer grows deeper, marketers can more effectively reach their target audiences with personalized messaging and content. Expect to see more ad opportunities surrounding smart speakers in 2019. – Timothy Nichols, ExactDrive, Inc.

3. Growth In Content Marketing

Content marketing will always have a strong impact because of the exposure and backlinks you can receive for your brand. Writing interesting content and marketing it to influencers is a win-win. You are helping people with solution-oriented content, and the influencers help your exposure and outreach so it’s widely seen by the right audience and shared with their peers. – Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design

4. A Turn To The Human Side Of Marketing

We are fortunate to live in an age of advancing technology, but we run a risk of oversaturating our market with off-the-shelf tools that gather faceless data and create ineffective content. Marketing has a remarkable power to inspire audiences. Instead of an influx of new tech to adopt, I predict we’ll embrace a deeper understanding of human behavior that will foster more meaningful relationships. – Hamid Ghanadan, LINUS

5. Integrated Online, Social And Mobile Marketing

2019 will be all about the integration of online, social and mobile marketing. Many businesses have dabbled in one or all of these marketing strategies, but true success in the year ahead will be marked by a fully integrated marketing program that incorporates all three. This will eliminate redundancies, increase efficiency and fully leverage content across these three major players. – Laura Cole, Vivial

6. The Growth Of Micro-Influencers

As influencer-tracking technologies continue to improve, brands are becoming better equipped at fielding and managing large networks of high-engagement, low-following micro influencers for their campaigns. This largely untapped market will soon allow for more brands to avoid the significant costs of mid- to high-level influencers and invest in more down-to-earth and relatable influencer marketing. – Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC

7. Audiences Made Part Of Brand Stories

The ability to engage with audiences (that is, making audiences part of the brand story) will have a huge impact. The less friction there is to engagement, the more connected people feel. Brands that are more willing to interact with customers publicly will have a strong impact—and brands that can show how this engagement influences their products and services will make an even bigger impact. – Bernard May, National Positions

8. Thought Leadership

Audiences seek expertise, critical insight and ways to be better at all points of interest. Experiential and interactive engagement with a brand is the future of consumer-brand connectivity. From live video, to recorded advice, to content with real-time responses, to contests and beyond, it’s about offering information and encouraging feedback from stakeholders in a way that establishes trust. – Scott Kellner, GPJ Experience Marketing

9. Transparency As Key To Winning Customers

Technology is giving us so many new tools and platforms that sometimes we forget that communication always happens between human beings. Brands are groups of people who try to communicate with other persons: their customers. In 2019, I expect transparency to be the key to winning the hearts of consumers, who will reward those brands that share their values in an authentic and transparent way. – Daniela Pavan, The Ad Store New York

10. Quality Trumping Quantity In Marketing

Content marketing has been preached to death by most marketers. Content marketing is important, but oftentimes companies are capitalizing on this strategy with over-optimized and bland content that is largely regurgitated from other companies doing the same thing. In 2019, I believe we will get more discerning and choose low-volume, high-quality content instead of high-volume, low-quality. – Brandon Stapper, Nonstop Signs

11. Customers Empowered As Brand Ambassadors

By utilizing tools like YotPo and BazaarVoice, we can now chalk up a percentage of a marketing campaign to leveraging our customers as brand ambassadors by asking them to share info on a product to their own networks. This helps bypass “influencer marketing” to an extent and lets us empower our customers to do the talking. – Loren Baker, Foundation Digital

Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Find out if you qualify at forbesagencycouncil.com/qualify. Questions about an article? [email protected]

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Three DIY SEO Tools for Your Content Marketing Strategy

January 28, 2019 No Comments

By Anna Fox

Is DIY SEO possible?

Yes, and it can improve your blog traffic quite a bit!

And more traffic means more monetization opportunities as well as more potential clients to work with.

So to state the blindingly obvious, increasing the amount of traffic to your blog is a top priority.

By utilizing proper SEO techniques and tools, you can dramatically increase your organic search visibility.

The good news is, SEO is not rocket science. You don’t have to hire an SEO consultant or pay for expensive tools. You can totally master DIY SEO at home and achieve long-term search visibility on a very tight budget.

Disclaimer: I am not an SEO expert, but I have been using the following tools on a regular basis when producing content for clients and myself. So I know what they help with and how to succeed, from my own experience.

What should you be looking for in SEO tools?

Unless you are a professional SEO consultant, the best criteria for choosing SEO software you can focus on are

Ease of use (You can understand how a tool works without additional training),
Inexpensive and/or free software
Reliability! Stay away from false promises and outdated SEO advice such as keyword density metric that can harm your content quality.

1. Google Tools: Monitor Your SEO Health (FREE!)

For the best in free, Google has its own set of optimizing tools for small businesses and content marketers in the form of Google Analytics and Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools).

Google Analytics

Google Analytics focuses solely on traffic driven to sites and offers statistics on what methods work for this, sales, and more. Everything is set up in a smooth dashboard that’s minimalistic and easy to read.

Google Analytics can get quite intimidating when it comes to goal tracking and setting URL parameters, but if you are just starting out, use the rule I went by:

If I don’t know what it means, move on.
Focus on what matters and learn everything else later

This helped me get started with Google Analytics. Install the script (using one of these plugins). Give it a few days to accumulate the data and focus on this section:

Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages

This will help you identify your articles that are driving more traffic. You can use a filter to drill down to article topics and sections to get a better understanding of your blog most successful pages:

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Google Search Console

Google Search Console scans your website and alerts you to any errors that you may have made in SEO specific to your website. Linking these two accounts together can also add data specific to your website through Analytics.

My favorite section here is “Performance”. (This can only be found insider new Search Console design. I believe it used to be “Search traffic”)

Here, if you enable the “Average position” tab, you’ll see your best-performing keywords in Google:

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While they may not be the top of the line in SEO Marketing tools, the ease of use is a definite positive. Search Console and Analytics are both compatible with mobile devices as well, allowing you to work on the move.

2. Text Optimizer: Implement Keyword Topic Research and Content Optimization ($60/m)

You’ve probably heard that you need to research and optimize for keywords in order to rank, right?

It’s not simple. You also need to know the topic well.

Fortunately, Google has moved away from matching keywords to content to understand its relevance. And it’s good news for content marketers who want to focus on in-depth, high-quality content.

These days Google understands semantic relationships between words, related concepts and neighboring topics. In other words, Google knows what should be included in a page copy for it to satisfy the user’s query better. Keyword research now includes intent research, synonymous concepts, related terms and neighboring terms.

With that said, put aside your traditional keyword research tools you are using now and give this tool a try.

Topic Research

Text Optimizer is a topic research tool which uses Google search results to give you cues on what needs to be included in a copy for it to rank better.

The tool uses semantic analysis to create topic clusters and help you create better-researched content that Google will like. It can be used to optimize your existing content as well as to create content from scratch.

Let’s see how it works and how it can help:

Say you have a general content idea
Single out a phrase that best describes the idea
Put the phrase in Text Optimizer

Now, select the “Start from scratch” option. The tool will search this phrase in Google and come back with the list of terms and concepts that need to be included in your content:

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Select around 20 of those terms that look like they will fit your future article well, then start working on your article. Here’s what I got for “healthy living”, for example:

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The tool also provides “Editorial Suggestions” that you are likely to find quite helpful. Those are popular questions on the topic you are writing about:

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Once you are done with your content, run the tool again (now choosing the “My text” option). This will show you whether your article is optimized well. Continue tweaking your copy until you have a minimum score of 80. Pay attention to the “Content quality” section for better results:

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This way, this helpful tool will direct your writing process allowing you to come up with both better-optimized and higher-quality copy.

One word of advice re. this and most other tools that analyze content – including Grammarly:

Sometimes, machines don’t understand nuance. Always make sure that the suggested changes actually look right to the eye.

3. Yoast SEO: Get Your Structured Data and Important SEO Elements in Order (Freemium)

I am a huge fan of Yoast, and you have almost certainly at least heard of them in the past. This plugin for WordPress guides you along the way to SEO excellence. You put in a focus keyword, write a meta description, put the focus keyword in the bulk text and let the plugin analyze how you are doing regarding basic SEO.

It will give you recommendations to further strengthen your SEO in the post, turning green when you have reached the minimum for Google benefits. It will help you improve readability and structure of your text by encouraging you to use shorter sentences and paragraphs, fewer words between subheadings, active voice, etc.

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Yoast also contains a lot of up-to-date sections that help you capture more Google ranking opportunities and optimize for the most recent SEO trends including:

Adding breadcrumbs (and using structured data for Google to love them)
Managing redirects (These are useful when you need to get rid of outdated content and send those users to newer articles on the topic
Optimizing for how-to queries (These are GOLD for writers)
Managing content blocks

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Additionally, the plugin comes with an enormous amount of SEO tutorials that guide you through complicated processes, explain SEO terminology and help you optimize your content better.

Bonus DIY SEO Tools

Cyfe: This tool is not an SEO tool, but it can be used for monitoring your SEO success easily. Import your most essential stats from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, your rank tracking tool, etc. Cyfe can save you lots of time and turn complicated data into easy-to-understand graphs. It’s a great multi-feature tool, especially if you are not doing SEO 24/7 and want to just keep an eye on your progress without spending hours going from a report to a report
Answer the Public: This site is a free tool that provides data for searches on popular search engines like Google and Bing. This can help you streamline the keywords you decide to use in your site. This one is also set up similarly to a search engine itself, and the data is clearly displayed for you on a dashboard. It may be a really simple tool, but it can give you valuable information that sends your ranking up leaps and bounds from where you started. It’s also a great content inspiration tool for FAQ pages, lead magnets and even eBooks.
Detailed.com: Do you want to get better at SEO? Detailed sends you two emails a month listing best SEO tricks and techniques. This won’t help you directly in your smaller market. But it will give you insights on what makes these larger companies tick and the strategies that they utilize to stay on top. This can give you an active look at these strategies being utilized without having to fork out the money to see your competitors.

Don’t underestimate the power of basic actionable SEO. By utilizing the DIY SEO tools when optimizing your content, you step out on the right foot and increase your chances of getting found online!

By Anna Fox

Anna Fox is the blogger behind Hire Bloggers, a website helping bloggers to find jobs and monetize their sites.

Sourced from Curatti